Biotechnology essays

Biotechnology essays Biotechnology can be used to help humans. As essayist Cecie Starr and Ralph Taggart write biotechnology can be used to cure rare diseases. Biotechnology can be used to help any form of life from plants to animals and even food. For more than three billion years, nature has been conducting uncountable numbers of genetic experiments. Biotechnology is a specific science that lets us find the most beneficial traits of any living life form. Researchers use recombinant DNA technology to look at genetic changes. Recombinant DNA lets laboratory specialist cut DNA from different species and put the molecules from it into bacteria or other types of cells. Researchers also use genetic engineering when doing their homophone experiments. Genetic engineering means to isolate, modify and insert genes back into the same organism or back into a different one. This technology originated with bacteria. Bacterial cells have a single chromosome that has all the genes they need to have to grow and reproduce. But a lot of species also have something called plasmids. Plasmids are small molecules of DNA that have genes in them. Restriction enzymes are able to recognize and cut apart a foreign DNA that can enter a cell. This can help fight off viruses because it can find bad DNA and reject it. Every living thing from the simplest to the most sophisticated has a genetic code that lets you know what kind of traits it will have. Restriction-fragment-length polymorphisms, or RFLPs, give lab geneticists another way of seeing human inheritance. Not only can they track the route of physical traits or disease through a family, but they can follow the way of genetic material by tracking RFLPs through generations if they have DNA from all the family members. To find a particular gene, geneticists look for RFLPs that are always inherited with it. Genes on a chromosome have one ...